“I’m headed to ad:tech hoping to get a better sense of the value ad networks might bring to publishers and brands. After listening to pitches from around 50 of them over the past 5 years, I have to admit I’ve become a bit cynical.

“Publishers are disappointed with ad-network CPMs. Especially when they focus on how much the ad nets, exchanges and servers are skimming off every transaction — $4 of every $5, according to Jordan Edmiston analyst Tolman Geff.”

If you mistype a search on Digg, prepare yourself to get teased by Burger King. They’re going to suggest your mistyping is caused by hands so tiny they can’t handle a BK Double Cheeseburger. From Mashable:

“The ‘error’ message reads: ‘Looks like your search had a typo. Maybe you’ve got tiny hands?’ While that may or may not be the reason for your empty search results, as Switched notes, that wording is actually a tie-in with an ongoing BK ad campaign where people complain that their hands are too small for BK’s massive double cheeseburgers.”

As more publishers recognize that their readers want to share content on social platforms like Digg, Twitter and Facebook — and enjoy the boost in traffic that follows — Digg is upgrading its publisher buttons and widgets to make integration easier and more effective. From my colleague Matt Van Horn’s post on Digg’s blog:

“Our publishers have found great success in driving traffic to their content by integrating with Digg. The Telegraph in the U.K. saw their traffic increase from 500k page views a month from Digg to 5.5 million page views due to a deep Digg integration. The Telegraph integration required custom work using the Digg API, but now with the new widget generator anyone can create a similar integration without development resources.”

Allowing fans of your brand to invite you into their Facebook newsfeeds is nice, but encouraging them draw their hopes and dreams inside a logo-embossed silhouette of your product takes it to a whole ‘nother level.

I’ve been a huge fan of brand-sponsored Graffiti drawing contests since BMW, Dell and other brands pioneered the approach, along with Mark Kantor and his partners at Graffiti. That was back when I was at FM and involved in selling the idea to brands. Now I’m just an impartial fan. Keep em coming, Graffiti!

Web content has its own Moore’s Law of exponential growth. In his column last week, Pete Cashmore referenced a few examples of the content explosion:

“In May 2009, YouTube announced that 20 hours of video content was being uploaded every minute. This week, the video sharing giant revised that statistic to 24 hours per minute. Last month, Twitter announced that users are producing 50 million Tweets per day, up from 35 million per day in 2009. Facebook, meanwhile, reports that users are posting 60 million status updates per day — in October 2009, that number stood at 45 million per day. “

Bob Garfield — Ad Age columnist, co-host of NPR’s “On The Media,” and author of “The Chaos Scenario” — tells the — suggests how media companies can be a part of the solution.

“In the traditional media there’s curation or editorial judgment brought to bear at every stage of the process. First there’s discussion of the story ideas, then the stories come in and they are edited and then comes the question whether they will run, and there comes the question of where in the publication they will be placed, and so on, so. There’s like seven, eight, even nine different steps along the line.

“When the old media collapses what will go along with it is the ability to have highly paid, highly trained staffed people to do that sort of thing. So you have to rely on the sense of the community, maybe even the sense of some algorithm before human hands ever touch whatever the content may be.”

“In May 2009, YouTube announced that 20 hours of video content was being uploaded every minute. This week, the video sharing giant revised that statistic to 24 hours per minute. Last month, Twitter announced that users are producing 50 million Tweets per day, up from 35 million per day in 2009. Facebook, meanwhile, reports that users are posting 60 million status updates per day — in October 2009, that number stood at 45 million per day.

“Digg has offered a first glimpse of its new website design, a radical reboot that not only alters the entire look of the site, but also ditches Digg’s rigid taxonomy in favor of user-selected tags. It also taps into the broader social web to help users discover relevant news stories.”

Overall US ad revenue for 2009 was $125 billion, down 12%. Newspapers and radio fared the worst (down 20% each) with magazines (down 17%) not far behind. Online display ads were up 7%. Infographic supplied by the Business Insider’s Chart of the Day.